It is critical for most companies to engage in marketing activities to maintain and improve market share. Many large companies spend millions of dollars on marketing. However, despite the amount of money spent on large marketing campaigns, often significantly less resources are spent optimizing marketing campaigns to maximize effectiveness for achieving business objectives.
Some typical efforts for analyzing marketing campaigns include generating reports that indicate sales volume for the products being marketed. However, the generation of rudimentary reports only gives a very basic understanding of how effective a marketing campaign is in improving sales. Furthermore, these reports may not be very beneficial for different users to optimize a marketing campaign and may not be the most accurate gauge of a marketing campaign's effectiveness.
For example, typically, many different users have different roles within a company's marketing division, and depending on their roles, they may need to view marketing data differently. An executive responsible for the entire Asian division would like to see all sales data for all products being sold in Asia. However, a sales manager responsible for a particular product in a particular city would only like to see sales data for that product in that city. In a typical scenario, different static reports providing the needed sales volumes would be created for the executive and the sales manager, and the reports would be run in batch jobs nightly or weekly and made available to the executive and the sales manager.
These reports do not provide any ability for the user to view data differently, and do not allow the user to run simulations to determine how to optimize their marketing efforts and investments. For example, the executive may want to break the sales data down by product line. A new report would have to be generated and then run to get the requested data. Later, the executive may want to view the data broken down by city. Again, a new report would need to be generated and then run. Each time a report needs to be generated, it would require a user to communicate with an information technology (IT) or database manager to create the report. Also, the IT person would need to determine whether the user has data access rights to the data for the report, and finally, the report would need to be run or scheduled to run at a later time. Thus, many tasks need to be performed to create and run reports, which is inefficient. Furthermore, the report has no ability to run if-then simulations that would allow the user to vary marketing investments to determine if it would positively impact sales.
Additionally, the static reports typically created through periodic batch jobs may not capture and preserve different relationships between data. For example, the sales manager may be given a budget for marketing multiple products in the city. One of the sales manager's duties is to allocate funds for different marketing activities. The sales manager may identify from the report that there is a reduction in sales volume for a certain product and may then decide to allocate a majority of the budget for marketing that product. However, the sales manager is unaware and the report is unable to identify that there is synergistic relationship between different marketing activities that does not require spending a majority of the budget to improve sales. Without knowing these relationships, it is very difficult to effectively allocate funds for certain marketing activities to improve sales.